Proponents of Remote Online Notarization (RON) have been touting its benefits, both to borrowers and the industry, for some time now. Now that the COVID-19 threat has led to social distancing requirements, there is increasing demand for a national standard to support RON to enable business continuity for lenders and financial institutions.
Have you ever stopped to consider how gradual major change truly is?
Sometimes, we don’t see how drastically something like the digital mortgage has evolved when we’re deep in the weeds every day. While it may seem that we have been talking about the digital mortgage evolution for a decade, when we take a step back, we see just how far the industry has come in its adoption of digital lending processes.
February brought the first major regulatory changes with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rolling out new the ARM regulations alluded to late last year. The GSEs announced plans for the gradual elimination (and replacement) of their ARM programs, which use LIBOR as the index for setting the adjustable interest rate. We have been working quickly to update documents but expect to see more changes and will alert you as more information becomes available.
In order to successfully introduce and deploy new technology, proactive change management is critical. As eClose adoption gains momentum, lenders who recognize the importance of laying the proper foundation early are experiencing positive adoption of this digital closing process. In collaboration with our partners at Simplifile, we have created a comprehensive guide for lenders interested in implementing eClose. Here are four key steps that every lender should consider. For a more comprehensive guide to implementing an eClose strategy, download, “E Closing: Lender Best Practices.”
One of the primary reasons mortgage lenders have been working to take their operations fully electronic is that paper is expensive. Storing it and then finding it later is extremely costly. And borrowers, for the most part, are tired of dealing with printed paper. For many lenders, the digital mortgage promises an end to paper and its expense.
Discover Home Equity Loans (Discover) is among the most innovative companies in the mortgage industry, and the six-year old mortgage arm of Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS) has outpaced home equity loan growth at other banks and credit unions, becoming the largest provider of closed-end second mortgages and growing to more than $1 billion in home equity loan balance in 2019.
This month’s changes were geared mainly toward document updates. In this post, you’ll find links to some of the work our experts were engaged in last month to keep our clients up to date and fully compliant. We bring you all the news in this month’s compliance update.
Virtually every lender is trying to remove physical paper from their loan origination process and get to a true end-to-end digital mortgage. Unfortunately, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s TRID rule made it harder for many lenders to do so.
How can mortgage lenders best navigate the fine line between reducing the risk of lending to highly leveraged borrowers and making homeownership available to more people? Over the decades, the pendulum has swung between tight lending standards that are safer (but more restrictive) and looser standards intended to help first-time homebuyers, lower income borrowers, or those with student loan debt.
